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Building urban resilience through networks and communities: lessons from Athens, Greece

As part of our public diplomacy EU-grant 'Getting to know Europe', European expert on urban resilience, Anthi Christou will meet with the Miami-Dade Community at large. Ms. Christou is Communications and Stakeholder Engagement Manager of the City of Athens Office for Resilience and Sustainability, Greece.

For the past decade, Athens has experienced a serious socio-economic crisis. Through concerted efforts, it has managed to survive, to adapt and to transform into a more creative and collaborative city. Through partnerships with NGOs, academic institutions, private organizations and others, the municipality built robust networks for critical relief, social services and other initiatives.

Just like South Florida, Athens is a large multicultural metropolitan region dealing with social inequality and segregation, budget pressures, lack of green spaces and increased vulnerability of migrants and the unemployed. These challenges, together with the impact of climate change in the form of increased heat waves and flash floods, necessitated an urban resilience strategy. For Athens, resilience is defined as capacity building to withstand chronic stresses and acute shocks, and can be achieved by building connections between people and breaking down silos between different levels of governance, the public and private sectors and civil society. This talk will present the Athenian experience with building networks and communities to facilitate, support and empower local actors and stakeholders in providing services to citizens, visitors and businesses.__________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________